North Carolina: Hillary Clinton moved aggressively on Sunday to press her advantage in the presidential race, urging black voters in North Carolina to vote early and punish Republican officeholders for supporting Donald Trump, even as Trump’s party increasingly concedes he is unlikely to recover in the polls.
Aiming to turn her edge over Trump into an unbreakable lead, Clinton has been pleading with core Democratic constituencies to get out and vote in states where balloting has already begun. By running up a lead well in advance of the November 8 election in states like North Carolina and Florida, she could virtually eliminate Trump’s ability to make a late comeback.
At times, Clinton is going beyond seeking simply a victory over Trump, asking voters to strengthen her hand in Congress and repudiate not just Trump but also Republicans who have accommodated or endorsed him.
After lashing Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania in a speech Saturday, Clinton urged voters at an outdoor rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, to elect a Democratic governor and to turn Sen. Richard Burr out of office.
Calling Burr’s Democratic challenger, Deborah Ross, “exactly the kind of partner I need in the United States Senate,” Clinton upbraided Burr for failing to reject Trump.
“Unlike her opponent, Deborah has never been afraid to stand up to Donald Trump,” Clinton said, adding, “She knows that people of courage and principles need to come together to reject this dangerous and divisive agenda.”
It is a sign of the extraordinarily lopsided nature of the presidential race that, even in a Republican-controlled state like North Carolina, Clinton is in a position to exhort voters to hand control of the Senate to Democrats. Though she is still not broadly popular, Clinton has cast her candidacy — and now, perhaps, her party — as a safe harbour for voters across the political mainstream who find Trump intolerable.
Seeming to peer past the end of the race, Clinton offered herself as a figure of conciliation during a visit to a black church in Raleigh on Sunday.
“There are many people in our country willing to reach across the divide, regardless of what you’ve heard in this campaign,” she said.
For Republicans, blunting Clinton’s ability to carry other Democrats into office has become the overriding imperative in the final weeks of the 2016 race. With Trump so diminished as a competitor for Clinton, Republicans say they will now ask voters in newly explicit terms to elect a divided government rather than giving Clinton unchecked power.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful super PAC that supports Republicans in the House of Representatives, is to begin running ads in the coming days that attack Democratic candidates as “rubber stamps” for Clinton and urge voters in swing districts to support Republicans instead.
Mike Shields, the group’s president, said it had tested that message and found it effective in closely contested races, even with voters who are likely to support Clinton over Trump.
“There are many districts where we are going to be running ads that talk about the Democrat being a rubber stamp for Hillary Clinton,” Shields said. “In many districts, it is a very, very potent weapon to use against a Democratic candidate for Congress.”
Republicans fear Trump will do grievous damage to the party unless he can close the yawning gap with Clinton in the presidential race. An ABC News tracking poll published Sunday showed him trailing Clinton by 12 percentage points nationally and drawing just 38 per cent of the vote.
Clinton, who drew support from 50 per cent of voters in the poll, was openly dismissive of Trump over the weekend, telling reporters Saturday that she no longer worried about answering his attacks. “I debated him for 4 1/2 hours,” she said. “I don’t even think about responding to him anymore.”
Karl Rove, chief strategist of George W. Bush’s successful presidential campaigns, said Sunday on Fox News that he no longer believed Trump had a realistic path to victory against Clinton.
“I don’t see it happening,” Rove said.
In addition to trailing by a wide margin in national polls, Trump has fallen well behind Clinton in states that are likely to determine control of the Senate, including North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Florida and New Hampshire, and also in suburban areas around the country that are critical to the Republicans’ House majority.
Two outside groups aligned with Republicans, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Senate Leadership Fund, have also begun running television commercials in Senate races that imply that Clinton is likely to be the next president and that ask voters to limit her power by supporting Republicans.
Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, acknowledged on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on NBC that Trump was trailing. She said the campaign had “a shot” at winning over undecided voters who do not now support Trump but who dislike Clinton.
While there are two weeks of campaigning left in the race, the window for Trump to resurrect his candidacy grows slimmer by the day, now that voting is underway in a number of important states.
Clinton is expected to spend two days this week in Florida, and also to return to North Carolina for a campaign event with Michelle Obama, the first lady, in a bid to lock down two states without which Trump has no realistic route to the White House.
